Blade’s Blind Date

After playing the game - something I do not recommend you do - we started picturing Blade on a blind date. I can’t say that it is logically connected to our thoughts on the title itself. However, we do recommend that you hear Blade’s voice in your mind as you read it. Thank you.

Blade II the game is getting reamed in the review department, and probably other departments, the reason for this being that the game isn’t very good. Not horrible, either. Just not good. Tepid. It’s not “buy it” good, in any event. The reviews I’ve read seem to hate the combat mechanism a lot, but I actually thought that part was okay - you use the right analog to push in the direction you want to attack. Pretty sensible, actually. Coming off of Dead to Rights’ concept of melee - which is an affront to the good people of the Earth, and which I suggested be excised entirely to make for a better game - it’s certainly an improvement. But that’s like saying that having crabs is an improvement over having herpes. Play a good recent brawler on the like Buffy, a game that feels as though every conflict is a series of real choices, and you’ll ask yourself why you’d ever bother with Blade II. I’ll cut the supsense: You shouldn’t.

My weekend was action-Goddamn-packed, I’m still trying to make sense of the stimuli. In fact, I think I need to sort it out for my own health.

I though that demo for Bandits was pretty cool, for example. I’ve played a good bit of that. The demo has multi, but I haven’t jumped in and tried it yet - I’ve mainly just enjoyed peeling out in the madmaxian dunes the included level offers, hosing down the lawless brigands of the future with fire. I don’t know how deep this game is, how expansive the configuration and chassis selections are for example - their anemic FAQ doesn’t answer the questions I frequently ask. Free is free, though. I can think of many interesting ways to interpret futuristic buggies in a teamplay context.

I finished Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide this weekend - when I set my mind on a series, my mandibles grip it tight while powerful devouring appendages called “chewers” satisfy my imperative. I’ve been told (by you, actually) to avoid every book past Card‘s Ender’s Game in that series, and to go instead with Ender’s Shadow, Shadows of the Hegemon, and Shadow Puppets - but I didn’t take the advice. I enjoyed Speaker and Xenocide quite a bit, but the last book - Children of the Mind - is harder for me to get into. I ran a couple searches on Card books at Amazon, and now seem to think I’m a Mormon for some reason. Don’t get me wrong. I like to morm, but it’s not something I could do all day.

A couple weeks ago, Porkfry and I were tasked with returning a keg to Bellevue, which is a place I find very unsettling. It’s the sort of place that has a lot of cars, but no visible people. It’s very clean there and the traffic lights seem very judgemental in my opinion. In this zone of suspicion and treachery, it is no wonder that my thoughts turned immediately to alcohol. We decided to do something fanciful, the way friends often do when they have no intention of actually doing it. We decided to make beer.

Our first plan was to just get all the equipment and fuck up many, many times en route to true brew mastery. Pork’s wife, whose directives always seem tyrannical until you realize she’s just way smarter than you, suggested that we go to one of these places that helps you out when you do it. So, we went to one. Like leather, plastic, or airplanes, I’d always assumed that the production of beer required the unswerving support of the military-industrial complex. I assumed there was a machine, “Beer” emblazoned matter-of-factly upon it, with a single button on it also labeled “Beer,” that when depressed produced the aforementioned. Not so! You make it in a large kettle like you would a soup or stew, except unlike stew you make it and then leave it out so that microorganisms will eat it for weeks. I’ve thought about it a lot, and I’d say that’s the main difference. Hugh Hefeweizen should be done in three weeks or so, at which time work will begin on Portergeist.

I am the BBC’s bitch. I’d thought I’d be free of daily visits to the video store once I completed the third season of Sopranos - which everyone told me was horrible, but I found marvelous. Well, I’m not free. Now I’m hooked on these Goddamn mysteries in the British section of my movie store, and there’s no end in sight for this shit. First it was Cracker, the psychologist that solves crimes. Then it was Sherlock Holmes, the really smart weirdo that solves crimes. Then, it was Poirot, the snooty Frenchman who solves crimes. Now I’m on this Goddamn Brother Cadfael, the monk who solves more crimes in the twelfth century! The BBC section of my video store is insuperable, sheer and impossible, a monolith. I rush to grovel prostrate before it every time I go in. “What must I do, master? Your will is my deed, command me.”